‘I never had to think about my personal safety.’ California election officials brace for mid-terms
These days, Bill O’Neill is careful when he talks to strangers. A chat at a store, or on a camping trip, can quickly veer off in the wrong direction.
So now if he’s asked, O’Neill just says he works in county government and tries to change the subject. He knows what happens when he tells people he’s an election official.
“I just want to have dinner with my wife and kids,” he said. “And it becomes a conversation about the latest conspiracy theory.”
Hostility and mistrust are facts of life for O’Neill, registrar of voters for El Dorado County, which Donald Trump carried with 53% of the vote in 2020. Multiple national polls show that about 70% percent of Republicans suspect fraud in the last presidential contest.
Less than three weeks before ballots hit the mail for the Nov. 8 election, O’Neill and his peers across the state are bracing for continued skepticism from those who believe the lies about 2020. While no evidence of widespread voter fraud has been substantiated, some California election officials are pushing for new levels of transparency in an attempt to quell doubts. And they are trying to encourage even more scrutiny of their work before, during and after Election Day.
In El Dorado, the elections office website features videos of O’Neill, 56, showing how ballots are handled and prepared to be counted. He also has a page devoted to “Election Integrity” with responses to concerns about mail-in ballots, drop boxes and the county’s voting equipment, which was manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems.
The company was the target of an extensive disinformation campaign by Trump and his supporters alleging connections to George Soros and Venezuela, among others. The firm has filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the owner of the Fox News network, which amplified the baseless claims.
O’Neill said he has nothing to hide. In a recent post on the office’s Facebook page, he put out this call for action: “Don’t trust elections? THEN SHOW UP AND WATCH!”
Hundreds of responses followed.
“Totally rigged....CALIFORNIA IS LOST FOREVER ....THERE IS NO POINT IN VOTING EVER AGAIN IN THIS STATE,” one said.
O’Neill was appointed registrar by the county’s Board of Supervisors in 2019 and has spent almost 20 years working in elections. He knows that no amount of transparency will be enough to convince some voters.
“Even though there’s only so much you can do to build back trust, you just keep trying,” he said.
And while he wants more people to come check out his office, he is also acutely aware of the potential dangers to his eight-person staff posed by an increasingly angry electorate.
In Nevada County earlier this year, the lobby of the elections office was temporarily closed after an encounter with supporters of an effort to recall the five-member Board of Supervisors for approving COVID-19 public health restrictions.
Three recall proponents had “stormed” the office and pushed an employee, the department said in a statement. Supporters of the effort disputed the office’s description of what happened.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice created a task force to investigate the rise in threats and harassment targeting election workers since 2020. California lawmakers last month passed a bill that will allow election staff, in certain circumstances, to make their home address, phone number and emails confidential to protect their safety. Gov. Gavin Newsom had yet to sign it as of Tuesday evening.
Earlier this year, the El Dorado elections office removed photos of staff from its website.
Kevin Bannon, who helps set up the county’s vote centers, supported the move. Although Bannon, who has worked in elections for more than 20 years, has not faced a specific threat, he is concerned.
“I’ve never had to think about my personal safety,” Bannon said. “Now I do.”
On the local front, ‘all on us’
After 2020, any election can bring heavy scrutiny.
Earlier this year in Shasta County, which Trump in 2020 won with 65% of the vote, waves of observers cycled through the office of Clerk and Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen. A militia-backed recall of a Republican county supervisor in February — in response to pandemic restrictions — sparked interest. So did the June primary, which featured supervisor, sheriff and district attorney contests.
“For these local issues, it’s all on us,” said Allen, who was elected to her fifth term in June.
Some watchers only came for a couple of hours and never returned again, Allen said. That meant election staff had to explain their signature checking, ballot sorting and counting processes over and over again.
“We have to balance transparency with just getting the work done and that’s been our challenge,” Allen said.
In November, she wants to have election watchers in one area near the room where votes are counted. Newly installed cameras will allow the observers to simultaneously see ballots brought into the office and sorted. She also hopes to hand out binders of information that can help explain what election staff are doing.
“Openness gets us to a place where people have the opportunity to be able to ask their questions and maybe maintain or regain trust in the voting system,” said Ryan Ronco, the top election official in Placer County and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.
Like O’Neill in El Dorado, Ronco believes that won’t work for everyone, “But I do think that for most people that are distrustful of the system, that over time we can be able to work together to regain trust,” he said.
In 2020, the Sacramento County elections department began providing a live video feed of its ballot counting process online.
Hang Nguyen, the county’s interim registrar of voters, said many people don’t realize that elections are open for the public to watch.
“We like it when people come to visit us because it helps them understand the process,” Nguyen said.
Still, the office this month announced it was reducing the number of days it will provide tours due to a high volume of requests. Doing so will allow “staff to focus on the work they need to accomplish without interruption,” it said in a news release.
Safety and uncertainty
Travis Tyus had suspicions before 2020. But the presidential election that year further damaged the Placerville resident’s trust.
He recalled seeing and hearing about election officials in some states covering up windows to prevent people from watching vote counting. Tyus asked: If there was nothing to hide, why would they do that?
He didn’t give a specific example. But in Detroit, election workers used paper to cover windows of a locked room where ballots were being counted, according to the Detroit News.
The newspaper cited an election official who said windows were covered because people on the outside were taking photos and videos and it was making some workers uncomfortable. Even so, hundreds of election observers were already watching over the count inside the room.
Tyus, 36, voted for Trump in 2020 and said he felt like there could have been a conspiracy against him. Although he has some trust in how elections work he also wonders if results are being manipulated to meet a certain outcome.
“It is really hard to say with 100 percent certainty how our votes are being counted,” he said.
O’Neill wants people with concerns like Tyus to come in and see the process for themselves. This week, his office began testing equipment that will be used in the election.
“The best way to verify an election is to watch it,” he said.
To that end, O’Neill also wanted to make doing so even easier in November. He had hoped to set up a live video feed that would allow people to watch the office’s ballot counting process online.
But that plan is on hold, he said, because of concerns about staff safety.
This story was originally published September 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘I never had to think about my personal safety.’ California election officials brace for mid-terms."
